Sebastião Salgado, Churchgate is the terminus station of the Western railroad line, built by the British; the railroad system covers much of India. The trains are notorious for being dangerously overcrowded, 1995 (2007.6.1)

March 2nd 2014: A reported drone strike killed three in the village of Al-Shabwan, 5km from Marib, while travelling in or sleeping near their vehicle. #drone #drones #yemen (at Erq al-Shabwan, Marib Province)

Endia Beal, who told me about her project in which she took white middle-aged women to a hair salon and gave them “black” hairstyles. She then took their photographs in the style of corporate headshots. Her work had a mix of humor and poignancy, a look at both race and gender; it quickly went viral.

“I wanted people that had a certain idea of what you’re supposed to look like in the workspace, because it would be a challenge for them to understand what I experienced in that space,” Beal said. “And to a degree, many young white women have shared that experience, but for older white women it’s an experience they haven’t necessarily had.”

• PHOTOGRAPHY INTO SCULPTUREExhibit Press Release
Review/article from Aperture
New York Times review/article about a contemporary re-staging at Hauser & Wirth Gallery of the original 1970s exhibit.Photography Into Sculpture, panel discussion. Video!

The Hillman Photography Initiative at Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) investigates the lifecycle of images: their creation, transmission, consumption, storage, potential loss, and reemergence. Technology accelerates the pace of this cycle, and often alters or redirects the trajectory of an image in unexpected, powerful ways.

The Hillman Photography Initiative is an incubator for innovative thinking on the photographic image. The Initiative centers around four projects that, taken together, investigate the boundaries and possibilities of photography through the way that an image travels. Conceived through an open, discursive process, unique in a museum setting, these projects include live public events at the museum, a pop-up reading room in the galleries, two collaborative web-based projects, and a series of commissions, including documentary videos, art projects, and writing.This website is designed to foster public conversations around the larger story that these four projects tell, and knit them together in a single experience.

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The Hillman Photography Initiative has so many cool projects: Orphaned Images, The Invisible Photography, I’m especially excited for the upcoming issue about Physics and photographic processes! (nerd), and This Picture, which asks people to stop, look and respond to one image at a time. One image at a time—how we should all be looking. Looking, not swiping through SnapChat and Instagram.

TECHNIQUES and TOOLSBefore drones (and projects like Dronestagram) were used for photographic surveillance, people relied on balloons, kites and pigeons. The camera in the above image was large enough to shoot large format film and required 9-17 kites to lift it.

San Francisco Bay, 1906
Read the rest of the article and see more images here.

Not everyone agrees with Hockney’s thesis. Some counter arguments, here and here. The later one is perhaps the most valid because its author is a scholar. Hockney’s project has inspired further exploration and scholarship.